Systems Engineers at Substack are responsible for building the foundational infrastructure, tooling, and systems that enable product engineering and feature development. We architect systems to support Substack’s fast-growing product ecosystem at web scale. S&R engineers work closely across product teams to build the next generation of infrastructure for Substack.
Substack’s compensation package includes a market-competitive salary, equity for all full-time roles, and exceptional benefits. Our cash compensation salary range for this role is $170,000 - $230,000. Final offer amounts are determined by multiple factors including candidate experience and expertise and may vary from the amounts listed above.
Responsibilities
- Build out Substack’s platforms to scale with growing traffic and a multitude of services to support writer and reader communities.
- Partner with engineers and other stakeholders to design resilient and responsive systems.
- Contribute to the whole product process in collaboration with designers, writers, support staff, and others. From product concept and research to implementation and deployment, we expect you to own your work and deliver high-quality solutions.
- We primarily work with Node/Express, Postgres, and Redis, and our cloud infrastructure is hosted on AWS. It’s helpful if you know some of these technologies already, if not, we’ll be excited to help you learn.
Requirements
- 5+ years of software engineering experience.
- Can contribute across the full web stack, with a focus on building resilient, scalable backend systems.
- Independent and autonomous. We’re too small to micromanage, and expect that every person at the company owns their work and can be a leader.
- Hold yourself and others to a high standard when working on production systems.
- Take pride in building elegant and delightful product experiences. Substack works best when it gets out of the way so writers can focus on writing and connecting with their readers.
- Enjoy collaboration with a diverse group of stakeholders while bringing your own unique experience and background to the team.
- Believe in Substack’s mission to build a better business model for writing.
Location: San Francisco or New York City
Substack is an equal opportunity employer. All applicants will be considered for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex (including pregnancy, sexual orientation, gender identity or transgender status), age, national origin, veteran or disability status. We’re seeking people passionate about enabling independent expression and building a better business model for creators. If you want to see what media, communities, and content can become when unmoored from advertising models, and you have the skills and experience to contribute, we’d love to meet you.
Top Skills
What We Do
Substack lets writers connect with their audience on their own terms and earn money doing it. We make it simple for writers to publish to an email list that they own, get discovered on the web, and charge for subscriptions.
More than 500,000 people pay to subscribe to writers across the Substack network, and the top writers make millions of dollars a year. Substack’s model depends on the success of writers using Substack – we only make money when they do.
“Substack makes it dead simple to start a newsletter and get paid for it.” – Judd Legum, author of Popular Information
"Substack gives me a way to connect with my audience on my own terms.” – Lyz Lenz, author of God Land and Men Yell At Me
Make something that matters
Great writing is valuable. It respects readers' time, their intelligence, and their trust. It helps us make sense of and change the culture we live in. At Substack, we're building a business model that enables great writing to thrive. Learn more about our opportunity and mission.
We are a small but growing team, and there is more to build than we could ever imagine. That’s why we need you.
We aim to take pragmatic approaches to problem solving while shipping high-quality products that allow the writing on Substack to take the spotlight.
Every person at the company participates in customer support. We do this to build empathy with our users and enable us to build better products.
We believe that a diverse team will help us build a product that best serves the needs of a wildly diverse ecosystem of writers. So whatever your background or perspective, we’d welcome your input to help build the best possible version of Substack.
